"suck it up and spend a little more on candy" or, the ethics and economics of trick or treat
Yesterday, on Facebook (where else?) a friend of mine posted this: Here is my response to those bitching about kids going trick or treating in neighborhoods not their own... Who cares. I'm taking my kids to [town redacted] like I did as a kid. Their great grandmother expects it and looks forward to it. If some has a problem with it they need to keep it to themselves or Come up with gas money to come with us. The bonfires are fantastic."
In the comment thread, this from another poster: "We go over to Clintonville. Started with going with friends who lived there, but they have since moved on and we continue going there. Heh. As for my post earlier about this, every.single.year there are comments on the neighborhood FB group about this (it's not [town redacted], I grew up in [town redacted). It makes me homicidal because indeed, why does it matter? Be thankful you live in a nice neighborhood where parents feel their kids will be safe. Suck it up and spend a little more on candy!"
Suck it up and spend a little more on candy.
That's the part that made me feel homicidal.
Five and a half years ago, Mr Moth and I moved from a lower working class neighborhood to a middle-working class neighborhood. We'd been broke all our lives together and figured we were willing to keep on being broke to buy a house in a solid neighborhood exactly halfway between his parents and mine. A dog-friendly place with room to write, a garage for working on cars, a dishwasher, and a room to write. You know...the American Dream on a modest budget.
And here we are. We sacrifice all the time to live here. And we know how lucky we are. If you've been around this blog awhile, you remember me posting about our adventures at the House on Whore Corner where prostitutes daily turned tricks outside our bedroom window, peed on the sidewalks, and sprawled across the hood of my car while waiting for customers. The upstairs neighbors were heroin dealiers. The downstairs neighbors fought constantly and called us slavers because we're white, and threw loud drunken parties outside our front window for the first two weeks of every month, until the disability money ran out.
(To be fair, I liked most of my actual neighbors. They just were just kind of hard to live up against. Often, I miss living there; I felt more like I belonged. Here I feel like Roseanne on Wisteria Lane.)
Back then, Mr Moth worked, I worked, and Zor was being raised by babysitters so we could afford (barely) to live in the armpit of Ohio.
We know what it's like not to l ive in Happy Swell Meadows, which I sometimes call Wonderbread Land because it is so very caucasian here, and which I also sometimes call Skunkridge, because whooboy, the skunks. I make acerbic observations about how everyone out here builds a six-foot privacy fence and then a three-foot deck. The most obnoxious neighbor is the ones whose kids scream like they're on fire for no discernible reason and give me a heart attack on a semi-regular basis. Other obnoxious habits include ignoring barking dogs and car hoarding. Nobody fights in the street here; kids play there. You almost never hear a stero thumping, in spite of the vast quantities of teenagers. And it is a nearly perfect neighborhood for Trick or Treat.
Nearly perfect because there are no street lights, so once the sun goes down it gets really--and ironically--dark. But the houses are all close to the sidewalk, most have only a stoop to contend with, there aren't any front fences or gates, and the dogs are out back where the fences are. Most of the families out here seem to have older children, and most have someone home passing out candy come Beggar's Night.
Halloween has been my favorite holiday for forever. When we lived on Whore Corner, we took Zor to Grandma's for Trick or Treat, and when she was older, nobody came to the apartment on the hill. (Sidebar: there was a shooting in that neighborhood this year during Trick or Treat.)
One of the little added (unexpected) bonuses of moving here was, sorry for the allcaps, but this is how it felt: HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THE TRICK OR TREATERS!
I had no idea how expensive it is to buy candy for so many children! Fifty bucks might not sound like much, until you consider that would be at least ten hours of after-tax wages at any job I've ever had.
That's ten hours of scrubbing somebody's dirty underwear or straightening up porno mags or putting forty ounce bottles of beer in a poke for the factory guys to drink on their breaks while they make trucks and making change with fingers blue from cold or being bellowed at by jerkoffs at Steak N Shake.
Ten hours.
But passing out candy and seeing all the little ones is a blast, so every year I guess how many kids we're going to have and plunk down the fifty bucks and hope I buy enough. Often it isn't. If we run out, we turn off the lights and close up. Otherwise we haul out lawn chairs and watch the parade of costumes and personalities. I'm of the mind that there's no such thing as being too old for Trick or Treat, so I don't care how old folks are. You could be eighty. If you show up at my house on Beggar's Night and say, "Trick or treat," I will give you a piece of candy, at least until I run out. And I don't care where you came from, either, because let me emphasise this: We used to live in the armpit of Ohio, and we used to have to take Zor to another neighborhood too. We get it.
However.
Nobody is legally or ethically obligated to pass out free candy no matter how wealthy they are. People who participate in the giving a basically throwing a party. Who goes to a party at someone else's house and then trashes the place and criticises the host? If you want to be welcome in other peoples' neighborhoods, how's about not walking down the street grubbing through your child's pillowcase of goodies, shoving things in your face and dropping wrappers like there's a maid coming. Furthermore, don't scream at your kids, don't scream at the people passing out the candy, and don't make snarky comments about the quality of the treats. Yes, this stuff happens. It happens every year.
Another thing that shouldn't need to be said but apparently does: slow down and drive like you have an ounce of sense! Hello--KIDS EVERYWHERE.
In summary, don't be an asshole.
Continue not being an asshole when you get home and go online. Don't post entitled sounding things like, "I have to make sure my kids get enough candy." Definitely don't say, Suck it up and spend a little more on candy. That one ruined this year for me. I'm honestly not sure I want to do "passing out" any more. I mean, I've been doing it, but since apparently I'm not doing it right, or enough, or with the right attitude, f*** it.
Yeah, we'll see, but right now I'm pretty much lodged at f*** it.
In the comment thread, this from another poster: "We go over to Clintonville. Started with going with friends who lived there, but they have since moved on and we continue going there. Heh. As for my post earlier about this, every.single.year there are comments on the neighborhood FB group about this (it's not [town redacted], I grew up in [town redacted). It makes me homicidal because indeed, why does it matter? Be thankful you live in a nice neighborhood where parents feel their kids will be safe. Suck it up and spend a little more on candy!"
Suck it up and spend a little more on candy.
That's the part that made me feel homicidal.
Five and a half years ago, Mr Moth and I moved from a lower working class neighborhood to a middle-working class neighborhood. We'd been broke all our lives together and figured we were willing to keep on being broke to buy a house in a solid neighborhood exactly halfway between his parents and mine. A dog-friendly place with room to write, a garage for working on cars, a dishwasher, and a room to write. You know...the American Dream on a modest budget.
And here we are. We sacrifice all the time to live here. And we know how lucky we are. If you've been around this blog awhile, you remember me posting about our adventures at the House on Whore Corner where prostitutes daily turned tricks outside our bedroom window, peed on the sidewalks, and sprawled across the hood of my car while waiting for customers. The upstairs neighbors were heroin dealiers. The downstairs neighbors fought constantly and called us slavers because we're white, and threw loud drunken parties outside our front window for the first two weeks of every month, until the disability money ran out.
(To be fair, I liked most of my actual neighbors. They just were just kind of hard to live up against. Often, I miss living there; I felt more like I belonged. Here I feel like Roseanne on Wisteria Lane.)
Back then, Mr Moth worked, I worked, and Zor was being raised by babysitters so we could afford (barely) to live in the armpit of Ohio.
We know what it's like not to l ive in Happy Swell Meadows, which I sometimes call Wonderbread Land because it is so very caucasian here, and which I also sometimes call Skunkridge, because whooboy, the skunks. I make acerbic observations about how everyone out here builds a six-foot privacy fence and then a three-foot deck. The most obnoxious neighbor is the ones whose kids scream like they're on fire for no discernible reason and give me a heart attack on a semi-regular basis. Other obnoxious habits include ignoring barking dogs and car hoarding. Nobody fights in the street here; kids play there. You almost never hear a stero thumping, in spite of the vast quantities of teenagers. And it is a nearly perfect neighborhood for Trick or Treat.
Nearly perfect because there are no street lights, so once the sun goes down it gets really--and ironically--dark. But the houses are all close to the sidewalk, most have only a stoop to contend with, there aren't any front fences or gates, and the dogs are out back where the fences are. Most of the families out here seem to have older children, and most have someone home passing out candy come Beggar's Night.
Halloween has been my favorite holiday for forever. When we lived on Whore Corner, we took Zor to Grandma's for Trick or Treat, and when she was older, nobody came to the apartment on the hill. (Sidebar: there was a shooting in that neighborhood this year during Trick or Treat.)
One of the little added (unexpected) bonuses of moving here was, sorry for the allcaps, but this is how it felt: HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THE TRICK OR TREATERS!
I had no idea how expensive it is to buy candy for so many children! Fifty bucks might not sound like much, until you consider that would be at least ten hours of after-tax wages at any job I've ever had.
That's ten hours of scrubbing somebody's dirty underwear or straightening up porno mags or putting forty ounce bottles of beer in a poke for the factory guys to drink on their breaks while they make trucks and making change with fingers blue from cold or being bellowed at by jerkoffs at Steak N Shake.
Ten hours.
But passing out candy and seeing all the little ones is a blast, so every year I guess how many kids we're going to have and plunk down the fifty bucks and hope I buy enough. Often it isn't. If we run out, we turn off the lights and close up. Otherwise we haul out lawn chairs and watch the parade of costumes and personalities. I'm of the mind that there's no such thing as being too old for Trick or Treat, so I don't care how old folks are. You could be eighty. If you show up at my house on Beggar's Night and say, "Trick or treat," I will give you a piece of candy, at least until I run out. And I don't care where you came from, either, because let me emphasise this: We used to live in the armpit of Ohio, and we used to have to take Zor to another neighborhood too. We get it.
However.
Nobody is legally or ethically obligated to pass out free candy no matter how wealthy they are. People who participate in the giving a basically throwing a party. Who goes to a party at someone else's house and then trashes the place and criticises the host? If you want to be welcome in other peoples' neighborhoods, how's about not walking down the street grubbing through your child's pillowcase of goodies, shoving things in your face and dropping wrappers like there's a maid coming. Furthermore, don't scream at your kids, don't scream at the people passing out the candy, and don't make snarky comments about the quality of the treats. Yes, this stuff happens. It happens every year.
Another thing that shouldn't need to be said but apparently does: slow down and drive like you have an ounce of sense! Hello--KIDS EVERYWHERE.
In summary, don't be an asshole.
Continue not being an asshole when you get home and go online. Don't post entitled sounding things like, "I have to make sure my kids get enough candy." Definitely don't say, Suck it up and spend a little more on candy. That one ruined this year for me. I'm honestly not sure I want to do "passing out" any more. I mean, I've been doing it, but since apparently I'm not doing it right, or enough, or with the right attitude, f*** it.
Yeah, we'll see, but right now I'm pretty much lodged at f*** it.